Is there a reason you can not offer the customer an option on how to pay?e.g. Various credit cards, BitCoin, Paypall, Bank order, On delivery,...Just like it is possible to make a choice on how you want it deliverd.

That way the customer has the choice. Sure, each has its advantages and disadvantages and it is then upon you to see how you deal with the possible extra cost (e.g. extra charge or reduction) and then let the customer make his choice.

This is all very "ideal world" though. The reality is that Bitcoin directly undermines established payment processors such as VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal. Consequently, expect that if Bitcoin continues to grow in popularity, that these companies will threaten to block payments through their networks to any merchants using Bitcoin in any official capacity. At this point it will most certainly be in the merchant's interest to drop Bitcoin.

Well, I'm sure I'd heard of it at some point, but I'd never been so interested by anything that I'd heard as to note what the site was even about.

I guess I've always had places to put my files online if I needed, so I never thought they were even vaguely interesting.. The only thingthat I could have told you about megaupload before his arrest, was what I could glean from the name.. AKA, "sounds like the either do, or allow you to do a lot of uploading"..... boring..

Heck the other day Megaupload sent me an email saying that a file sextrivia.txt violated their TOS. It apparently had the word sex in it. Even though it was just a list of trivia questions rather than porn or something. I might have been like one of the only people using it for legit purposes, and still got burned.

http://filecloud.io/ [filecloud.io] cloud storage site (with more features + cheaper than Mega btw) has been accepting bitcoins for a long time, and being an Irish company has to follow Irish+EU dataprotection laws

Make no mistake; Mega encrypts files for it's OWN protection. If you want encryption worth considering a defense for yourself, you should be using Truecrypt before uploading to the cloud anyhow, no matter where it's going. Mega's encryption is about plausible deniability, not making anything particularly bulletproof.

If you're really interested in privacy of your data stored on some cloud service, I'm sure you'll understand that the only way to make sure that your data is safe is to encrypt the data yourself before uploading.

And why would we use filecloud when we KNOW the political establishment hates Mega so at least with Mega they wont turn over our most private thoughts to the police for political points.When it comes to stuff like cloud storage it's very important that the company watching over our data doesn't have a political agenda. If they do then they might abuse our trust.

If you properly encrypt your most private thoughts before sending it to the cloud, you don't have to worry about to whom that company may give that pile of bits, because without the key it will not be worthwhile anyway.

Here's an example of where the rule that prepositions shouldn't go at the end makes a sentence more awkward rather than less. Now you have this awful "about to whom" pile-up. Instead, you could write: "you don't have to worry about who that company may give that pile of bits to".

who feels like a larger chunk of the stories on/. cater to freetards and the people grasping on the latest technology fad? Wow, mediocre service is accepting a currency more volatile than the Zimbabwe dollar. Wait, but that service is MEGA and that currency is BITCOIN, let's frontpage this shit!

Americans have faith, they separated religion from government, but swear to god, and the dollar states "in god we trust".

And history tells a different story, even when faith in dollar starts flickering, people start to believe in it and it outgrows currency problems - leaving the poor and impoverished people in the dirt of their hopeless existence.

This stuff however isn't Fiat money, not even Yugo money:) - it's an empty promise from people with no reputation to lose. It's just another Ponzi scheme but this time baited for geek. The fixed volume of potential bitcoins is a pretty massive clue that it's a scam.

"Ponzi scheme" is not a synonym for "something to do with money I disagree with". Stop using it as such. Bitcoin isn't a Ponzi scheme because it's not an investment scheme. Furthermore, since all the details about Bitcoin are publicly known, it's hard to see how it could be called a scam at all - there are no below-table dealings there.

"Ponzi scheme" is quickly becoming the Godwin of economic discussion.

The fixed volume of potential bitcoins is a pretty massive clue that it's a scam.

While it's likely that deflation makes Bitcoin unsuitable as a currency, that doesn't make it a scam, just flawed.

The idea that deflation leads to depression was proven to be false [minneapolisfed.org] back in 2004. The "Bitcoin has a flawed economic design" argument is wrong and I will keep posting this study on Slashdot until it gets modded up and people read it.

"Ponzi scheme" is not a synonym for "something to do with money I disagree with". Stop using it as such. Bitcoin isn't a Ponzi scheme because it's not an investment scheme.

If you're going to argue something it's probably not smart to quote something that ruins your argument. The vast majority of BitCoins are being held as an investment/speculation, and the only way it'll pay returns is by subsequent BitCoin buyers driving up the price allowing the early investors to sell off their BitCoins at a profit, since BitCoins don't produce anything or have any value by themselves. Current BitCoin holders have exactly the same incentives as members of a Ponzi scheme to keep the pyramid

What he quoted doesn't "ruin his argument". Bitcoins are no more an investment scheme than domain names are. Sure, you can camp on domain names and hope they go up in value. That does not make the DNS a ponzi scheme.

OK then pedant - pyramid scheme, however the popular usage is "ponzi scheme" and the full description of such on wikipedia applies here if not the dictionary definition. Since it fits the description so well it's no more a Godwin than bringing up the Nazis in the context of 1930s German politics.

that doesn't make it a scam, just flawed.

"Flawed" by design with the "flaw" being of benefit to the founders - thus a scam.

Well, not as large as the states that make up the former Yugoslavia, but the Bitcoin money supply ($295 million) is 1.8% of the Slovenia money supply ($16 billion), one of the states it broke up into. That's not bad considering Bitcoin's money supply was negligible two years ago.

* Bitcoin makes no promises, it is a transaction protocol, like FTP or HTTP. If someone is making promises, point them out.

* Bitcoin units in circulation are growing at about 12% a year, so it is not fixed volume. The final quant

There's plenty of reasons why both are unsuitable as the basis of a currency and the modern world (1700 onwards) would not exist as it does today if either of those still were the basis of a currency. An easily readable description of why is in the Neil Stephenson novel "The Confusion" - it really comes down to static versus dynamic systems.Anyway there's no point arguing about currency systems when what we have here is just an old fashioned pyramid scheme the just happens to be baited for gee

You've claimed that any investment in a fixed supply of something is a pyramid scheme. We mention Gold and Land (which also fit these criteria) and you hand wave about whether you're trying to use something as a currency or not.

Virtually all commodity investments have static supply in the short term. Bitcoin is a digital commodity. In fact it's the first digital commodity to be both counterfeit-proof and non-centralized, and those four properties (digital + commodity + counterfeit-proof + decentralized) dri

You've claimed that any investment in a fixed supply of something is a pyramid scheme

No - I've claimed bitcoin in the specific case is a pyramid scheme, then I wrote a bit about historic problems with actual currencies. Don't put words in my mouth and argue against your own construct.Bitcoin is an artificial device designed to make the early adopters in the pyramid benefit greatly from the late adopters who do not benefit much at all. The flaw is deliberately designed into the system - thus a scam where

Ingredients to the US dollar are 98.5% nothing if I recall correctly.. Then about 1.5% paper..

All currencies are nothing but an assumption/hope/promise that someone else will recognize them as having value. This is just as true for those "backed" by some other substance or item; commodity money relies on the assumption/hope/promise that someone else will recognize the commodity as having value. (Take your gold to a tribe in Africa where wealth is measured in cows, and hilarity ensues.)

You have that backwards. As more people use bitcoin, its distribution becomes increasingly limited which in turn will raise its value. Luckily its divisible to 8 decimal places. Once bitcoin is the same as 100 million satoshi's.

Be that as it may, Mega and Bitcoin are on the cutting edge of both technology and politics. Even though their direct impact may be small, they are a looking glass for what the future may look like. Decisions made today may have large legal ramifications in the near future.

a side note about bitcoin: ASIC mining is starting now. I guess this is why bitcoin price rised recently. asicminer [bitcointalk.org] has currently 2TH, and prepares for next 12TH. 2 avalon [avalon-asics.com] units have been shipped, and one of them is reviewed by Jeff Garzik (bitcoin developer). Nobody knows when other 298 avalon units will arrive, etc. But slowly asic mining becomes part of the history.

The difficult adjusts to the block discovery rate such that the supply of bitcoin is roughly fixed. ASIC miners won't have much impact on total bitcoint production but they will dramatically change who gets that production.

So it really depends on how the willingness to sell differs between the old GPU/FPGA miners and the new ASIC miners.

Some time ago Gregory Maxwell proposed the idea of autonomous programs that maintain their own Bitcoin wallet. He gave the concrete example of StorJ, a program that provides encrypted file hosting capacity a la MEGA. By buying server time from VPS providers and re-selling services, purchasing advertising via ad networks that offer APIs, hiring humans to improve their code and spawning children that grow up and compete with the parents in the market, StorJ would be the first artificial life form truly worthy of the name. I enclose a copy of his proposal below for your perusal. I also wrote a wiki page on the concept [bitcoin.it] where I explore the relevance of trusted computing and TPM chips to this use.

Want to share a file? send at least enough coin to pay for 24 hours ofhosting and one download then send the file. Every day of storageand every byte transferred counts against the balance and when thebalance becomes negative no downloads are allowed. If it stays negativetoo long the file is deleted. Anyone can pay to keep a file online.

(additional services like escrow can also easily be offered, but thatsnot the point of this document)

Well engineered, a simple site like this provides a service which requiresno maintenance and is always in demand.

Many hosting services are coming online that accept bitcoin, theyall have electronic interfaces to provision and pay for services. Someeven have nice APIs.

An instance of the site could be programmed to automaticallyspawn another instance of itself on another hosting service, automaticallypaid for out of its revenue. If the new site is successful it coulduse its earnings to propagate further. Because instances adapt theirpricing models based on their operating costs, some would be morecompetitive than others.

By reproducing it improves availability and expands capacity.

StorJ instances can purchase other resources that it needs:it can use APIs to talk to namecoin exchanges in order to buynamecoin for conversion into DNS names, or purchase graphicdesign via bitcoin gateways to mechanical turk. (Through A/B testingit can measure the effectiveness of a design without actually understandingit itself).

StorJ instances could also purchase advertising for itself. (thoughthe limited number of bitcoin friendly ad networks makes thishard right now)

StorJ is not able to find new hosting environments on its own, due to alack of sufficiently powerful AI— but it can purchase the knowledge fromhumans: When an instance of StorJ is ready to reproduce it can announcea request for proposal: Who will make the best offer for a script thattells it how to load itself onto a new hosting environment and tells itall the things it needs to know how to survive on its own there?Each offer is a proposed investment: The offerer puts up the complete costof spawning a new instance and then some: StorJ isn't smart enough to judgebad proposals on its own— instead it forms agreements that make itunprofitable to cheat.

When a new instance is spawned on an untested service StorJ pays only theminimum required to get it started and then runs a battery of tests tomake sure that its child is correctly operating.

Assuming that it passes it starts directing customers to the new instanceand the child pays a share of its profits: First it proxies them, so it canobserve the behavior, later it directs it outright. If the child fails to pay,or the customers complain, StorJ-parent uses its access to terminate the child andit keeps the funds for itself. When the child had operated enough toprove itself, storj p

You gotta work for virtual money too. Just using Tor is a risk of current or future government persecution. So you risk your future using Tor. So you get compensated but I doubt the compensation is worth the risk.

Don't get me wrong, it's worth it to browse Tor and see whats on there. Hosting is a completely different story with different levels of danger.

Er, do you really think PayPal will allow accounts that are not owned by a human? Can you even do everything on PayPal via an API? PayPal sucks even for people due to rampant account freezes and buyer fraud, I can't even imagine how unfriendly an environment it'd be for programs. Especially given that file hosting costs are likely to be micropayment sized.

PayPal business account set up in the name of a corporation. Later the corporation buys up all it's outstanding shares, becoming self-owned (or if that is not legal, a cycle of two corporations that own each other's stock). An autonomous agent actually operates the corporation, with no employees.

I see no real advantage to using Bitcoin and Tor just for storage when you can store it on Mega or anything else on the more reliable Internet. Also anyone who uses Tor receives the stigma of rapist, pedophile, terrorist, just by using it at all.

So what are the benefits to Storj and who is it marketed to? Is Storj supposed to be the black cloud or something? Once again for what purpose do we need a black cloud and who is going to use it?

The mechanism to ensure that malicious code isn't spawned by human actors is flawed, I can't see how it wouldn't get hijacked and turned into a botnet. How does it find said humans? How does it validate their code outside of simulated sandboxes? Can easily develop a malicious payload atop of the legitimate program.

There are multiple ways to allow humans to modify the code safely, but yes, it's one of the parts of the idea that needs more fleshing out. In the wiki page I proposed the use of TPMs and trusted computing technology to help resolve some of these issues - you can have a small immutable core that handles the money which can't be changed, and then human upgrades can be limited to things like optimizing the web UI, the install scripts, etc... things which can't steal the money. You can also run human-provided

It's in anyone's self interest to use 50 free gigs of encrypted cloud storage. The majority of the political dispute are just politics and have nothing to do with business or value to the customer. Megau is the best product whether you agree with it's politics or not. Bitcoin is a political move by Mega probably as a hedge out of fear the US government might try to cut off it's revenues somehow.

Mega and these sorts of products are just more important than the political special interests. The user having privacy to think as they like is an essential human right. This essential human right is tied into the right of having encrypted cloud storage. It is not in the best interest of humans as a species to give up the ability to have private thoughts. Anything you put in your cloud is your thoughts and anything you search for via Google are your thoughts. There might be instances where in the course of say a child porn investigation we might need to check a customers search records to rule them out, but there is no reason to check peoples cloud storage. If it's a situation where a person somehow has dangerous classified information then put the person under surveillance if it's about national security. The police have no business here, the RIAA has no business here, and Mega isn't going to protect people from total surveillance and it's not designed for it so once again the people who are against Mega are against it for political reasons only. Political reasons are not always in the best interest of the community or the country.

Sometimes we have to set politics and ideology aside and use the best product if it's the best. Google drive isn't offering 50 gigs of storage and doesn't encrypt it. Facebook doesn't offer 50 gigs of storage either. Once again they should not have a right to view out files as there never has been any legal justification for giving the police the right to view out private files.

Wikileaks has nothing to do with Mega. When you even put them in the same category you endanger Mega. Wikileaks was basically functioning to piss the US government off almost exclusively for the past few years and wasn't prepared for the reaction. Wikileaks was threatening not just a faction within the US government but the entire State Dept itself. That being said the actions to try to block the flow of money were unconstitutional as Julian Assange is not an American Citizen they had no business trying to

See I thought the same thing but then discovered that "use" is a key word in this sentence. I've so far not even managed to successfully back up my photo collection and a few other odds and ends to the tune of a mighty 4GB. The upload speeds I'm getting are terrible, the interface makes it worse in that you must have the browser running to upload anything. It doesn't do jack shit in the background (like dropbox does).

Last month, just a couple days prior to the launch of MEGA, Slashdot ran a story that informed us all that each user would get 50GB gratis storage [slashdot.org] on the service. This story brought with it a comment from the creator [slashdot.org] of ScatterBytes [scatterbytes.net], the distributed storage backend that MEGA uses. The entire reason that gratis 50GB can even be offered to all users, and indeed one of the oft-touted improvements of MEGA over MegaUpload (to try and convince us we won't lose our data at the whim of any given government like last time), is that anyone with spare storage space and bandwidth can be financially compensated for hosting the (encrypted) data of other MEGA users.

The concept of this distributed storage and accompanying financial compensation system is certainly a more novel approach to what file lockers have offered in the past, and this is precisely what ScatterBytes is providing to the infrastructure of the MEGA network. But I was shocked to learn, in the comment of ScatterBytes creator [slashdot.org], that the financial compensation system would be using PayPal. Why the creators of MEGA & Scatterbytes would be so short-sighted and foolish to base their system off of a centralised, USA-based payment company widely known to be the Internet sector of the US financial-military-industrial complex was completely beyond me.

As a server operator myself, why would I want my disk space (NOT in the USA) to be a part of the MEGA network (NOT a US website) when details of my contribution (and a cut of the profits) would be handed directly to a US company known to directly work with the US government? Had the people behind MEGA & ScatterBytes not been paying any attention to PayPal's history? Shouldn't the operators of a file locker site which was mercilessly raided by the moneyed American corporate interests trying to stymy progress (and currently entangled in a court case [scribd.com]) be slightly more intelligent and aware than this?

In my response to his comment [slashdot.org], I asked the ScatterBytes creator why they are creating a system that would hand the US government banking-level details of MEGA collaborators , easily sortable by size of contributions no less! For the successor site to MegaUpload, this level of unthinking oversight is absolutely embarassing. MegaUpload's servers are still sitting in limbo [arstechnica.com], and people have served jailtime over this service. Why any third-party (ie most of us on Slashdot) would be enthusiastic to contribute to the relaunch of this service, even if it does differ technologically from the previous incarnation, when it means giving all of our personal information to an organisation as nefarious and unfriendly to progress as PayPal is beyond me. To Jack's Complete Lack of Suprise, within a week of the launch of MEGA, an organisation seemingly created to kill file locker services [stopfilelockers.com] (at least ones which multimedia publishing cartels decide to target) worked to shut off PayPal access to the primary MEGA resellers [torrentfreak.com]. So much for paying attention to history [wikipedia.org].

To see adoption of BitCoin is good news, but it's what should have been done at launch. It's 2013. We don't need centralised US-controlled middlemen spying on all of our financial transactions and taking our money anytime we want to transfer funds. We ha

It appears the ScatterBytes creator actually replied to your comment and asked for advice/help on implementing Bitcoin payments, so I'm not sure you should say his "level of unthinking oversight is absolutely embarassing". Perhaps if you'd helped randallman, they'd be accepting Bitcoin already.

You are absolutely correct, and I should have indicated this in my initial post. I did not actually mean to come off as dismissing the work of the Scatterbytes creator, as his system (even in beta) is the most solid attempt at solving the technological problems of relatively secure, web-based distributed storage that I have seen. And I was very glad that he seemed receptive to implementing support for BitCoin in response to my comment in the earlier story. Personally, I have enough work to do than help h

ScatterBytes is NOT the backend for MEGA! I'm not sure how I gave that impression. I have however worked BitCoin into the service and to my delight, it has enabled the creation of registration free storage nodes. That means to run a storage node, all you'll need to provide is a BitCoin address to accept payments, and you can just put that in the configuration file. Uploading/Storing data still requires a verified email address because it seems necessary to me for billing. I'd like to support other paym

In the last 3 months: money supply expansion halved, number of merchants doubled, wordpress accepted it, US facing pokersite leaks they will accept it, largest gambling site profit up hundreds of %

If this stuff happened to any company, its share price would double.

Also, in the last year:Network transaction fees per day are up 1100% from 4 to 48Explosion in p2p exchanges for cash or bank transfers on sites like localbitcoinsCoinlab and BitPay each got 500k in venture capital. Coinbase got 100k.Bitcoin Foundation Launched in September 2012ponzi worth between 250k and 5mil collapsedBitInstant lets you buy bitcoins at walmart, 7-11, and CVSSilk Road is doing at least 2mil/month. Forum usage up hundreds of percent over last year.A $10mil company will be releasing the BitcoinCard this year at the Vienna Bitcoin Conference. The Russian founders say 5 years of research have gone into this technology allowing a super-low-power credit card sized device to send texts, bitcoins, login info, and consumer data through an ad-hoc network instead of cell towers, at a card cost of only $10-$25SatoshiDice has shown the potential of the bitcoin gambling market by earning $600k, including 17,266 bitcoins in DecemberMany companies in the bitcoin community have gone public.

What some people here on Slashdot are missing is that bitcoin is not just a virtual currency, it's a transaction protocol, with new features being developed and applications being written. It should be thought of in the same category as FTP and HTTP, as a means of securely transferring balances, rather than bits.

The protocol can be used for other purposes than a currency. You can use it anywhere you need to securely transfer a quantity, value, amount, or balance from one place to another online. Think fo

A $10mil company will be releasing the BitcoinCard this year at the Vienna Bitcoin Conference. The Russian founders say 5 years of research have gone into this technology allowing a super-low-power credit card sized device to send texts, bitcoins, login info, and consumer data through an ad-hoc network instead of cell towers, at a card cost of only $10-$25

You have to pay to get your arse raped by Russian gangsters? I can't imagine the most helpless slashdot virgin falling for that one.